Will Henniker

I had the pleasure of working with Dr Alan Meade’s on the interactive output of Arcade Britannia, a celebration of British amusement arcades and their central roles in seaside communities. For over a hundred years, these spaces have delighted and scandalised their visitors, and emerged as important regional economic, social, and cultural hubs.

The arcade cabinet built was displayed in Somerset House at the London Design Biennale to an expected 35,000 visitors. https://www.eurekabydesign.com/pavilions/2023/canterbury-christ-church-university

My involvement with Arcade Britannia varied through out the projects development life span (originally starting in 2020) but my main roles entailed supervising the initial development of 3D assets and the Unreal Engine build, Creating a Unity port, Creating a 360 video experience, and working on the Arcade Cabinets hardware.

The Arcade Cabinet its self was an original Electrocoin Xenon from 1989 that had the original CRT and power supply. We had originally scoped a bespoke exhibit cabinet but we felt that the Electrocoin was far better for the experience, being from the time period we was recreating.

Simply put, the Arcade Britannia Cabinet in its current state, features an LCD screen, a modern PC with and IPAC to link the joysticks and buttons to keyboard presses (and as such the build) the cab can be easily turned on and off with a single button hidden at the back of the cab for ease of exhibiting for a curator.

But this was not the cabinets original form… “wouldn’t it be cool if we could get the Unreal Engine 5 build to play through the original CRT”

We did eventually after some SERIOUS trial and error manage to achieve this, a full fat, Unreal Engine 5 game running through a CRT screen from 1989.

Some serious work arounds had to be found, we not only had to tune the colours and focus on the CRT but we also had to down scale in software AND in hardware, taking a full 1920*1080p build down to a much lower 320*240p resolution. This was mainly achieved in the end by using a secondary older GPU with a VGA output and using OBS to broadcast the game screen to the out put on the VGA card at a lower resolution.

Ahead of some stress testing of the cabinet, we had thought we was set for exhibition at Somerset House, however, one final issue occurred that ultimately led to a positive, but sad change for the project.

The CRT screen, despite our efforts would not pass a PAT compliance test and had to be removed and discharged.

Ultimately this led to us replacing the CRT with a modern LCD and some tasteful screen effects, which after playtesting we discovered, actually led to a more visually clear experience whilst still keeping the feel of the original cabinet.

Additionally I also contributed some Unity 5 development to the project including an optimised port of the build with the intention of creating a lighter experience for mobile devices and VR. I also produced a custom 360 video player for an accessible version of the experience.

Check out the final exhibition photo and this video on Arcade Britannia! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cg29-RO2ATs&t=300s